“Go wherever he goes. No matter where,” counseled Ruthie. “Even ball games. Even if they kill you.”

  “Don’t have children right off,” suggested an engaged girl. “Wait a while and enjoy yourself first. But then I’m talking to the air,” she decided. “You’re Catholic. You’ll have one before you’re married a year.”

  “Don’t kill yourself washing,” was Reenie’s contribution to the manual of marriage. “Send your laundry out to the wet wash. So you lose a towel once in a while. What’s a towel compared to your health?”

  Even the aloof, luscious, red-haired Marie came through with something. “Don’t let yourself run down after you’re married,” she said. “Keep your hair curled and dress up every night like you had a date.”

  Mr. Prentiss caught the fever of advice giving and contributed a thought. “I understand you’re going to take the plunge,” he said in his likable unoriginal way. “Well, look before you leap,” he advised. “But on the other hand he who hesitates is lost.” He took off his glasses. “Sometimes I think it’s better,” he looked away from her as he talked, “to shut your eyes, take the plunge and hope for the best. Only I wish you weren’t leaving,” he blurted out.

  The look of pleasure that spread over her face frightened him into thinking he had said too much. His mother would consider that too personal a remark to address to an employee. “What I mean,” he amended, “is that I hate to see any of my girls leave. It’s so hard to break in new ones.”

  He didn’t fool Margy. She knew he was sorry she was being married. He had to be because that worked in with her dreams. She had a romantic feeling about him. Now that she was soon to marry another man the romantic feeling seemed sinful and more exciting. She thought again of that poem of grammar-school days—the girl raking hay on a summer day and the rich judge riding by and the refrain: “It might have been.”

  Listen to me! Margy chided herself scornfully. It could never be. Only in books do girls marry the boss. He’s way above me—college and all. Besides, he’s too old; past thirty. Then there’s always his mother. But it’s nice the way he has a saying for everything. That’s the benefit of a good education. (And if I have a son, he’s going to Fordham.) Mr. Prentiss would be a good father, I guess—the way he’s so patient. He’ll make the right girl a good husband someday—providing he doesn’t wait too long. He’d be the first to say that time and tide waits for no man. He sure makes it wait for him, though. Poor Mr. Prentiss! He’s so darn decent.

  18

  THE MALONES MADE no special preparation for Margy’s visit. Frankie had mentioned that he knew a girl he’d like to bring to the house. His mother looked at him sharply but said nothing. Patsy urged his son to bring the girl around so’s he could give her the once-over. “Don’t bring her if she’s bow-legged, though,” he said. Everyone in the family thought this was very funny except Frankie.

  The night of her visit, the house was the same as usual; helter-skelter, everyone rushing around and Malone studying the undertaking business. Frankie had asked his mother whether she was going to fix up the house a little for the visit and she had asked: “What for? It isn’t as though you were going to marry the girl.” She waited. It was his chance to tell he was engaged. But he just didn’t have the nerve.

  They were not at all constrained in their greetings of Margy. The old man gave her a slow looking over and decided she had a nice shape—or would have if she ever filled out. Mrs. Malone took one look at her, settled herself more firmly in her corsets and prepared to do battle for her only son. After the pleased-to-meet-you’s and the likewises of the introductions, the sisters went about their preparation for the evening. Cathleen kept running into the parlor and asking Frankie whether her slip showed and Noreen asked him to “button her up in the back.”

  “How come I rate all this?” asked Frankie. “Other days they pass me up like a bundle of dirty wash. But now, all of a sudden, I’m important around here. How come?”

  Margy knew how come. The Malones were letting her know that Frankie was their property and no outsider stood a chance. The conversation consisted mostly of Mrs. Malone reminiscing with her son, with explanatory asides to Margy.

  “Remember that time, Frankie, when you and me went to St. John’s to plant geraniums on your grandfather’s plot?” In an aside to Margy: “He always goes with me no matter where I want to go.”

  “Don’t let’s get off on me, Ma,” protested Frankie.

  “He don’t want me to tell certain things,” hinted his mother. She turned on him again. “Frankie, whatever became of that pretty little girl you was so crazy about?” she asked. Aside to Margy: “He’s very fickle.”

  “Love ’em and leave ’em is his motter,” said Mr. Malone.

  “And that other girl,” she went on, “the one whose father had means. She was the athletic type. I really worried over that one. She got very serious about Frankie.”

  “Now, Ma, you’re only saying that. I hardly knew those girls.”

  “And Irma! I bet you she’s sitting on the stoop this minute waiting for you.”

  “Ma’s making all this up,” he explained to Margy.

  Margy smiled painfully but said gaily, “My! I didn’t know you were so popular.”

  “I’m not! I don’t like girls,” he blurted out.

  “I don’t see Miss Shannon wearing pants,” observed Malone. “Or maybe I’m not supposed to see.” He laughed heartily.

  “You don’t like me to give you away to your new girl friend, do you, Frankie?” said Mrs. Malone. Aside to Margy: “He wants you to think that you’re the one and only.”

  This is what Reenie would call getting needled, thought Margy. She knew that Frankie had not yet told his mother of their plans. She put her left hand on Frankie’s knee intending that Mrs. Malone notice the engagement ring. Mrs. Malone’s eyes flicked to the ring and back again to Frankie’s face.

  “Frankie, tell her about that time you was almost engaged to that girl what was older than you,” suggested Mrs. Malone.

  Frankie lifted Margy’s hand and drew her left arm through his as they sat on the davenport side by side. He gripped her hand tightly. “Ma, Margy and I are thinking of . . .” He swallowed hard.

  “Frankie and I are going to be married,” said Margy clearly and suddenly.

  “No!” exploded Mr. Malone.

  “Yes!” said Frankie. “I hope there’s no law against it.”

  “Keep your teeth in your mouth,” threatened Malone casually. By this time, Mrs. Malone had recovered somewhat from the announcement.

  “Married?” repeated Mrs. Malone. She laughed heartily. “What could he gain by getting married?”

  “You know,” suggested Malone slyly. His wife ignored him.

  “Why should he tie himself down?” she continued. “Home, he has his own room. A married man has to share a room with his wife.”

  “And bed,” added Malone, his thoughts turning easily to the salacious.

  “I cook what he likes. A wife would cook what she likes and he’d have to eat it even if it killed him. Here he can stay out till all hours of the night. A wife wouldn’t let him get away with that. And he’d have to hand over all his pay, too. Here he gives me just so much and keeps the rest to spend on hisself.”

  “How much did the ring cost?” asked Malone. But as usual, he was ignored.

  “I cook for him,” summed up his mother, “wash for him, ask no questions about where he goes. What does he want a wife for? What can a wife give him that I can’t give him? Answer me that, Miss Shannon.”

  “I will,” said Margy obligingly. “She can give him children.”

  “Good for you!” boomed Malone. “That’s one on you, Nora,” he told his wife.

  Suddenly Mrs. Malone’s eyes filled with tears. She got up and left the parlor without the conventional “Excuse me.” Malone got up and shook hands with his future daughter-in-law. The visit was over.

  Her mother asked her how the Malones had taken it. “Well, they were kind of surprised,” said Margy. “But they were all right.”

  However when Reenie asked her about it she said: “It was murder!”

  19

  FLO DID NO carrying-on as the time for the marriage came near. However she became more quiet and thoughtful and the bitter look on her face subtly changed to a tragic look. Once she urged Margy to wait another year. (You’re young, yet. You have your whole life before you.) But Margy didn’t want to wait. She was anxious to get started on her new life.

  Flo tried to make up for all her sins of omission in those last two months. Painstakingly, she laundered the girl’s clothes and foraged far out of her neighborhood for food that was “different” and yet within her means. In a way, Margy longed for the routine meals of ground steak or eggs. They’d make supper seem less sad.

  Henny took to staying home nights because Flo almost convinced him that it had been his going out in the evenings that made Margy decide to marry so young. Both parents avoided quarreling in the presence of their daughter. Only hissing whispers in the night behind their closed bedroom door indicated that they pursued the familiar tenor of their lives in private.

  They had always meant to be good parents; to make their girl happy. But they had kept putting off the time to start. This is only for now, Flo thought. Someday next week, I’ll take time and make something good to eat. Next month I’ll buy a new spread for her bed. She’s been asking for a pink one for so long. Sometime I must ask her if she has any friends—she must have some—and I’ll fix up the house and ask her wouldn’t she like to have them here. Next year maybe I can let her get that new winter coat. Maybe Henny might get a raise, then I could let her keep more of her pay.

  Tomorrow—next month—next year. Everything was always going to be better in the future. And suddenly the future had come. It was a brief present. Too soon it would merge into a past to be remembered. And now there were two months of the present left. She tried to do everything in that time. She couldn’t manage the new coat but she dyed Margy’s white seersucker bedspread a pale pink.

  DECEMBER, THE MONTH set for the wedding, began to draw in. According to the books Margy read this should have been a happy time; full of anticipation of the ultimate consummation of love, heady with hopes for the future, plans for children, tender with thoughts of how two people who could not live without each other would have each other until life’s end.

  But it wasn’t that way. It was a time of sadness and foreboding. The parents on both sides were unhappy. Both families would miss the financial help of their children. But they were used to economic deprivation and would adjust themselves to it. What saddened most was that the families had counted on marriage lifting their children up out of the environment in which they had been born and reared. Marriage was one of the few chances in the world that the poor had to better themselves.

  Flo had no dreams of a knight in shining armor riding by on a white horse to scoop up Margy and set her upon his saddle’s pommel with her white chiffon robes floating back in the breeze. She had no such dreams because she had never heard of knights and didn’t know what shining armor was. But she had had dreams of the knight’s equivalent; a decent man of a better family; a professional man or one in business for himself; one who would set up her daughter in a little house which he owned on Long Island or somewhere not too far from Brooklyn; a house with all the modern conveniences. He would be someone who would give Margy not the luxuries of life but lifelong freedom from grinding want for herself and her children.

  Henny felt as Flo did—that Margy should have married someone who’d improve her life. But marriage to Frankie being inevitable, Henny began to have hopeful thoughts about the boy. The Great American Dream had betrayed Henny. But why couldn’t it work for Frankie? Henny began to dream of Frankie becoming indispensable to his firm; getting steady increases in salary; working himself up to be one of the bosses. Why not? It had happened before. It could happen again.

  Yes, the Great American Dream had betrayed Henny. Sometimes he wondered whether it had ever existed in the first place. But it must have existed sometime in America. There were records—there was history to prove it.

  The Dream was this: The important ingredients of wealth, fame and success were backgrounds of poverty, hard work, ambition, rigid honesty and systematic saving. Henny had had the correct ingredients. His folks had been desperately poor; he, himself, had worked at hard labor since he was a child of twelve. He had been ambitious—had thought of going to night school after the laboring day was over. He had even saved a little money before he married. He had lived as honestly as possible, cheating no fellow-man and giving sixty full minutes of work for every hour’s pay he received.

  And he had become neither successful, famous or wealthy. In fact, he had become poorer and more obscure with each passing year. So he concluded that The American Dream had faded away into the mists of legends. The Dream had had its heyday, reasoned Henny, about the time of Horatio Alger, the favorite author of his boyhood. The Alger book titles were subtitles of the Dream. From Rags to Riches.

  And there was the true and golden chronicle of Abraham Lincoln, who had been the poorest of poor boys.

  Once in the first days of his marriage he had discussed the Dream with Flo. “What does a man have to do in America,” he had asked, half jokingly, “so that he has a chance to turn out like—say Lincoln?”

  “He has to sit in a box at the theater and be shot dead by an actor on the stage.” They had laughed over the remark. Then Henny had said:

  “I’m sunk. I can’t afford to buy a box seat at the theater.”

  It had seemed funny then. But often recalling the little dialogue in later years, he realized how bitter it had been.

  But he still believed that Frankie would make good and his daughter would have a comfortable life. He had to believe in something, otherwise he would have found the going hard.

  20

  MARGY QUIT HER job a week before her wedding. The girls gave her a little party during the lunch hour of her last day. Reenie had started a collection and a committee had spent a Saturday afternoon choosing and buying a box of Rogers’ Silverware for a wedding gift. With Miss Barnick’s co-operation, Reenie got Margy out of the office while the girls decorated her desk with a white crepe-paper tablecloth and blue crepe-paper swags. A cake with a papier-mâché bride and groom atop was placed on the desk next to the open box of silverware. The crack typist of the office had typed the names of the contributors in red on a wide white satin ribbon which lay, with its notched ends, across the box.

  Margy had a hard time acting surprised—having served on a similar committee for Ruthie some months before. But she was genuinely moved and tears flooded her eyes at the thought of leaving the only friends she had ever had.

  Mr. Prentiss came to the party—pulling off his glasses as he crossed the room. He declined a piece of cake saying that he seldom indulged in sweets, but he was induced to take a piece home to place under his pillow to dream on.

  The publicity department sent a photographer. He took a picture of Margy standing behind her desk cutting the cake, Miss Barnick on her right, Mr. Prentiss, sans glasses, on her left and all the girls grouped behind. The picture was for the house organ but they promised Margy a print.

  Half an hour before closing time, Mr. Prentiss told Margy she was “fired.” That was the traditional way of giving an employee who left in good standing time for individual farewells. Margy went to each girl’s desk and the good-by was the same with each as it had been with former office brides and Margy.

  “So you’re leaving us, Margy?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t blame you. This dump!”

  “Oh, I like the office. It’s just that I’m getting married.”

  “I know!” Sigh. “Well, I wish you luck.”

  “Maybe I’ll need it.” Margy smiled.

  “There’s many a true word spoken in a joke.”

  “Gloomy Gus. That’s you.”

  “I suppose we’ll never see you here again.”

  “Oh, sure. I’m coming back to see you girls.”

  “Yeah? They all say that but they never come back.”

  “But I mean it,” vowed Margy. “And you must come see me when I’m settled.”

  “It’s a promise!”

  “Well . . .” There was a clumsy pause.

  “See you in church,” promised the girl.

  “That’s no lie,” said Margy. “I expect you to come see me married.”

  “I’ll be there with my hair in a braid.”

  Again the pause. Something more needed to be said—something important; something that could be remembered for always. But neither had the words.

  “Well, it was nice knowing you,” said Margy.

  “What do you mean was? You still know me.”

  “I mean . . .”

  “Sure, I know what you mean, Margy. Likewise.”

  “Well . . . good-by.”

  “Don’t say good-by.”

  “So long, then.”

  “So long. I’ll be seeing you.”

  SO MANY BRIDES had promised to come back for a visit but few did. Occasionally one would come back after the honeymoon, glowing and happy, and dressed in trousseau finery. She never repeated the visit. A year later, the girl who had been her closest friend at the office might receive a birth announcement. The friend would collect nickels and dimes from the other girls and a silver-plated baby spoon would be sent to the infant. No announcements came of subsequent babies. Years later in the washroom, one of the older girls would muse:

  “Whatever became of Ray?”

  “Didn’t you ever hear?” another girl would reply. “She’s living in Elmhurst. I heard they have three children and are paying on their home.”

  “Well I’m glad it turned out all right.” Then the girl was forgotten.

  MARGY’S FAREWELL WITH Marie the office beauty was brief.